


kicking up stones

by jokeperalta



Category: Poldark (TV 2015)
Genre: 2x04, Drabble, Episode Tag, F/M, Pining, dwight has a strong case of the feels, written before 2x05 but actually turned out to be pretty canon compliant so yay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-02
Updated: 2016-10-02
Packaged: 2018-08-19 05:04:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8191273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jokeperalta/pseuds/jokeperalta
Summary: Caroline Penvenen leaves Cornwall, and Dwight’s life goes back to relative normality.
Caroline Penvenen leaves Cornwall, and Dwight’s life feels a little duller, a little more grey, for her absence.





	

Caroline Penvenen leaves Cornwall, and Dwight’s life goes back to relative normality.

Caroline Penvenen leaves Cornwall, and Dwight’s life feels a little duller, a little more grey, for her absence.

Habits he’d formed unconsciously are harder to break: searching every horizon for a splash of red; rounding each corner half-hoping to see her in her carriage, Horace perched regally in her lap. He catches himself every time in that first week, frustrated with himself. Frustrated with her for slipping so easily into the fabric of his life, so gracefully that he barely noticed she was doing it, then ripping herself out of it again. He feels as though he’s feeling every stitch, every tie to her come loose individually. 

It pains him more than he would have thought.

 

 

//

 

 

The next batch of oranges she ordered arrives two days after she leaves. There seems to to be even more of them this time and he’s still immensely grateful, yet he can’t seem to bring up the same sense of delight in him that they had previously. Dwight wishes it weren’t to do with being unable to thank their source in person.

He finds himself telling anyone who’ll listen who they came from instead. He could say it was a matter of properly attributed gratitude and credit, but the warmth he gets from peoples’ surprise that Caroline Penvenen of all people was responsible for alleviating the bout of scurvy says otherwise. He doesn’t want to be the only one who remembers she was once here, doesn’t want to be the only one she made an impact on. Maybe no one thinks of her as much as he does, but at least maybe they’ll think of her–and fondly at that.

He eats the very last of the oranges himself; it’s hardly big enough to be satisfying to anyone, and battered and bruised from being in the bottom of the very last bag on the cart. He still smiles sinking his teeth into a segment.

One day he might look at an orange without thinking of her but that day is not today.

 

//

 

Dwight hears nothing of her or indeed her engagement in London, but given his distaste for and avoidance of county gossip, it doesn’t necessarily mean it hasn’t happened. He isn’t sure whether he’d want to know for sure if it had. He hopes she’s happy, at least, and hopes Unwin Trevaunance defies all expectations Dwight has of him and is a good husband to her.

The sense of nostalgic longing pervades every thought when his mind finds its way back to her. It bothers him more that he doesn’t know, really, what he’s even longing for. For her to come back? For her to have never left at all? Even if either of those were the case, it’s hard to imagine that anything would be different between them. She’d still be all but betrothed to Unwin Trevaunance, they’d still be echelons apart.

_But at least she’d be here,_ the part of his mind he tries to suppress in the light of day whispers to him.

Dwight closes his eyes and tries to sleep. The only place he’s sure to see her is behind his eyelids, after all.


End file.
